Notes and instructions for replicating Large-Scale Evidence for the Effectiveness of Partisan GOTV Robo Calls

The results for this experiment were created using Stata 14.2 with a little bit of Microsoft Excel used to calculate some percentages and format results for inclusion in the paper. The data is in a stata file called "Replication data for Large-Scale Evidence for the Effectiveness of Partisan GOTV Robo Calls.dta". (At least, that's the name of the file we're submitting to JEPS for replication.) The code for replication is in a text file called "Replication code for Large-Scale Evidence for the Effectiveness of Partisan GOTV Robo Calls". 

Before you get started, there are some commands in the replication file that export results to Microsoft Word files with the command outreg2. For these and any parts that filenames are used you will need to change the filepaths to match the directory structure on your own computer. It may help to use ctrl+f and look for "dropbox" to find all of those, but I wouldn't recommend relying entirely on a find+replace because the filepaths aren't the same for every table.

On a related note, there are several commands that have to be installed to Stata using "ssc install". I believe that the only commands you'll need to do that for are outreg2, orth_out, and mhtexp. They're really helpful commands to have!

Once that's done, to replicate the results you just need to run the code from that text file. There are about 16 lines of code you'll want to run at the beginning to clean the data a bit by imputing some control variables. These commands are there (instead of integrated into the uploaded data file) so you can be comfortable with how we're doing that imputation.

After the initial code, the code to replicate the figures and tables in the manuscript and appendices are listed in the order that they appear in the text (figures first then tables). Where applicable, we've noted how tables were combined or if percentages were calculated in Excel. In some cases, such as for basic summary statistics, we just copied the output data from Stata into Excel for calculating percentages or organizing/formatting before copying it into the paper. For ease of replication of these results, I recommend that you select the relevant data, right click and choose copy table (or ctrl+shift+c) - it'll paste into Excel much better that way.

Thanks for reading - feel free to reach out to me if you have any trouble replicating the results: dan.kling@gmail.com